Contesting the Climate Unthinkable: Latin American Cultural Responses to a Warming World

Examining Latin American cultural works that rethink environmental change and natural catastrophes

This volume explores Latin American cultural works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that reflect environmental changes brought on by colonization, capitalism, and resource exploitation. Contributors examine films, novels, photographs, and videos from the Caribbean, the Southern Cone, the Andes, and the Amazon, showcasing how artists, writers, and activists depict the scale and impact of ecological crises.

Drawing from environmental humanities, decolonial thought, and Indigenous scholarship, this book examines how relationships with the nonhuman reshape human understandings of ecological collapse and resilience. Contributors discuss movies on toxic waste in Chile and Bolivia, gothic elements in horror, art and mineral extraction in Venezuela, dystopian novels set in the Río de la Plata, Mapuche poetry and dance in protest of terricidio, and utopias in Brazilian Afrofuturistic novels. They show how speculative fiction, testimonial narratives, experimental films, and site-specific installations address environmental disasters, climate breakdown, and extractivism, revealing the colonial histories and economic structures that underpin climate change.

The chapters in this book examine artistic forms that amplify the voices of affected communities and envision more ethical futures rooted in regional cultures, geographies, and practices. Highlighting the significance of perspectives from the Global South, this volume broadens understandings of environmental justice and ways of rethinking planetary survival.

Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Azucena Castro, assistant professor of Latin American cultural studies at Rice University, is the author of Posnaturalezas poéticas: Pensamiento ecológico y políticas de la extrañeza en la poesía latinoamericana contemporánea.

Gianfranco Selgas, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London, is the author of Regionalismo ensamblado: Cultura, ecología política y extractivismos en Latinoamérica (1930–1940).

Ken Benson, emeritus professor of Spanish at Stockholm University, is the author of La subversión silente. Carmen Laforet: poética y hermenéutica.